Poetry

Breaking and entering, Walter called what he did the night before, and tipped back the bottle of corn whiskey in the cornfield. This bottle he stole, and some jewelry which he threw in a sump. Sumps, he slurred, where the run-off gathers and levels high by morning. Sometimes they'd find a small kid there belly…

Louis Labonte in the fourth grade had a cherub's round smile, Bugs Bunny teeth, and his father owned Lou LaBonte's Inn, perched on a high embankment, three white-shingled stories, facing the snowed Sierra in all seasons for those who cared to look. Behind was the Weimar Sanitorium, which for many years helped victims of tuberculosis…

Squinting at Wordsworth's hasty script in dim museum light, I was struck by a lightning flash of memory— I'd read this letter to Coleridge twenty-five years ago with sleet hypnotically tapping my dorm room's panes. Drowsing over The Norton Anthology, dizzy from a bout with flu, I skimmed over William's aches and pains, telling myself…

Here's the green delivery truck pulling away, here's the black nest of fumes. Hungry, awake before the birds, we crawled out from an abandoned car, from a lean-to or an all-night john, through the hole in a chain link fence or a tunnel burrowed in thicket, just two or three of us, rubbing our bellies,…

Times like this, when gnats wheel in light above the magnolia, I believe I'll return to this life, that you will return. I will be the battered woman in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who hobbles to the interstate with a girl child in the rain, who picks up a ride and counts the bells of sage…

Every other Sunday we went there. My grandfather opens the trunk and removes a pail crammed full of garden tools, a pair of gardening gloves, in the silence, of course, that a visit with the dead requests of us. He limps to his son's name, kneels down on one knee and grimaces with pain. Inserting…

Those were strange days, when we were kids Says the bartender I remember this one kid I met Doing construction down at Huntington Beach Told me he used to work for some drug dealer Like the guy was thirty-five and bald The way I'm getting myself And Mikey was some blond god, Irresistible, so his…

—for Cecil Allouise Knott, my grandmother: Those who love us are the best teachers. The blackened window fogs above the drainboard. She sighs and cannot see the holly berries she will pin to her dress in the morning. She brushes strands of blue hair with a rubber glove and scalds the knives and forks repeating…